Documents / FOIA release
This JPRS translation, dated 1 May 1993 and released by the Central Intelligence Agency, reproduces an article by Col. Marian Kopczewski of Poland's Higher Officers School of Antiaircraft Defense. The article appeared in a Polish air force and air defense journal. Kopczewski assesses the military threats Poland faces from its neighbors after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. He argues for restructuring Polish air defense into separate peacetime and wartime systems. He notes that during the Cold War any unidentified flying object was once taken as the start of World War III.
“Cooper”1 page
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1993 ## Document 2 of 19 41. -Alerting and keeping posted the government and the military about air activity in neighboring countries and any eventual actions taken in the vicinity of our borders. 42. -Assuring air security (with the object of protecting the integrity of the airspace) by responding to any overflight that constitutes a threat-that is, to any unidentified overflight or one not following the accepted rules. 43. -Controlling air traffic, chiefly to ensure adherence to rules and standards, and coordinating military air traffic with civilian air traffic and experimental flights. 44. -Conducting search-and-rescue operations, inclusive of the organization of operational cooperation among teams searching for lost aircraft and rescue teams. 45. The postulated scope of the peacetime objectives of air defense requires radical organizational changes. In that context, the Border Guards should be responsible for the air protection of borders, in partnership with civilian monitoring and control of air traffic and civilian communications and supply systems. That would be the first measure to break with the practice of ''standing on guard of national sovereignty with fully ready armed forces,'' a practice that should be regarded as a cold war relic. 46. Periods of intensive change are always characterized by considerable uncertainty about the future. That is so now, too; we can consider many probable scenarios of the future geopolitical situation in Europe, but we cannot predict which one will prove true. On the one-to be sure, realistic-extreme, there is the possibility of the formation of a European security system in the short run, while, on the other, there may arise the danger of Poland's becoming isolated from the European Community and facing a growing military threat. 47. In view of that, our fundamental strategic objectives should be, first, the creation of sufficient defensive strength to discourage potential aggressors from attempting to use armed force in order to exert pressure or perpetrate aggression, and, second, in the event of aggression, to repulse the enemy's strikes and, in the event of its invasion of our national territory, to destroy its forces or push them back beyond our borders. 48. Thus, the need to start work on adapting the Polish air-defense system to the new political, economic, and defense conditions arising in our country and in the neighboring countries is justified. Those conditions require an innovative definition of the role and place of
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 9 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.